This is why I have long said that we need to fire each and every last federal-level politician and bureaucrat, then take a survey of the American public to find out who would be interested in holding/running for public office, and then immediately and irrevocably ban all those people from holding office too.
I'm with you. Look at my user number - I've been a regular/. reader for quite a long time, and haven't previously had any real reason to bash it over the years. The site has had it's issues from time to time, but this was just... glaringly ignorant.
Just as you may, in a way, know a thing, but it often takes someone or something pointing it out in order to make that thing plain and obvious to you in its application, it is often the same with any form of writing or journalism where continual or poignant reminders of these things may be necessary to keep one on track in their writing, instead of just blandly saying "Wow, this is sensational... I think I'll just pass it along as it was sent to me with no real credible research, validation of the claims' truth, or any reasonable editorializing... Look, I posted an article; I've done my days work and justified my (likely 6-figure) salary."
As for your follow-up statement, there is an incredibly relevant quote up today on my Google homepage quotes of the day:
"Science is facts; just as houses are made of stones, so is science made of facts; but a pile of stones is not a house and a collection of facts is not necessarily science."
- Henri Poincare
All I'm calling for here is a reasonable level of honesty, integrity... Well, maybe a little bit of actual hard-work at journalism and editing from a group of people who are apparently only pretending to be journalists, and instead are nothing more than George Jetson style button-pushers who post up anything that might increase readership and posting counts, instead of actually pushing out thoughtful and insightful news.
Clarity, consistency, honesty and intellectual integrity are not the domain of science and engineering alone... While those traits are useful in those pursuits, as in... well, ANY of life's worthwhile pursuits, science and engineering OFTEN falls short of those goals, and they are just as important when relaying information or attempting to communicate clearly as they are anywhere else.
Besides, you further my point for me... A journalist or editor whose specific focus *IS* science and engineering (as in/.) should find these attributes just THAT much more important than would, say, someone writing the Food & Dining section in the local pulp-rag. If I were making CmdrTaco's salary, I think I'd be a little more interested in justifying said wages and do a better job at being a journalist, as opposed to "CmdrTaco, approver of random FUD." Maybe he should change his nick to "Mordac, preventer of information (technology)." I think he might find his job and life a tad more fulfilling if he weren't just spewing out whatever waste comes across his desk.
Would you really expect anything less from CmdrTaco? Not that I think the people who work for the major media and went through 4 years of it in college are doing any better a job, but I think that he (and thereby/. and it's audience) would benefit greatly from his taking a few journalism courses. He's got the hang of sensationalism alright, but perhaps he should examine the finer aspects of journalism like clarity, consistency, intellectual honesty, in-depth research providing valuable insights to the reader instead of FUD, etc., etc. It's not as if he hasn't been at this a few years now... You'd think that, being a commercial website focused on delivering news and information to geeks, that, just perhaps, by now they'd have learned how to do a little research and actually provide some real information and intelligent articles instead of just blindly passing along whatever some troll dragged up off of a random news site.
You know, actually, I think a system to apply mod points to articles themselves and perhaps not just the person who passed along the article, but the editor who posted it would be a nice addition. Add karma into the mix, and perhaps we'll eventually see who the best of the/. editors are, with the potential for good, community conscious editors to rise up from the user pool who have some concept of what "news for nerds" really means, which would involve real information based on honest inquiry and research instead of just forwarding along unfounded FUD. Give a stable selection of long-time readers with positive karma and posting scores the ability to see articles before they're posted and vote on their relevance, accuracy and "truthiness" before they're slammed out to the general readership... and maybe even the ability to edit those submissions into something that actually resembles news and information, and we might have something worthwhile going here. As it stands,/. is every day becoming more like a blog or sci/tech oriented version of del.icio.us, and less a medium for reliable, thought-provoking news and information.
The U.S. is NOT a democracy (we're a republic, damnit, get your facts right)
Seeing as how a republic is "a government having a chief of state who is not a monarchy" a democracy can very well be a republic.
Ah, allow me to clarify... We are a "Representative Republic", which is a different thing altogether than a democracy, where the will of the masses is not necessarily the will of the nation. Why? Because as I sad before, "never underestimate the power of stupid people in large groups." When this nation was founded, it was believed (and true, then, as it still is today) that the average citizen simply was not educated and experienced enough (especially in international affairs) to make well reasoned, rational decisions on how their nation should be governed. This is why we still have the electoral college. The "people" are still too naive and ignorant, on average, to have any say on their nations governance... I mean, seriously... The average American citizen right now doesn't know who the Secretary of State is, but they think that "Survivor" or "Jackass" is quality entertainment, and I don't know about you, but those damned sure aren't the people I want having a hand in decisions about my nations foreign or domestic policies.
Uh, someone mod parent flamebait, as well as ignorant.
My views are not what is fatally outdated, it is your poor, overly cynical philosophies and lack of motivational ethics that are fatally flawed and incredibly dangerous; I can but hope that you don't pass such nonsense on to your children, having them think that this nation should be some kind of mob-rule democracy who should just give everything up to any majority just because they said "I want, gimme."
The people who built the internet still have a big role in its design going forward, and I don't know where you're from, but AFAIC, "freedom at all costs" is still MY ideal and the ideal this nation was founded on. If you don't like it, go to China; me, I'll be happy to fight tooth and nail for those beliefs while you're busy trying to sell my country out to the communists and socialists and those bunch of corrupt bastards at the UN... Do you REALLY think that a governing body that would appoint a nation like Libya to the head of it's human rights council would have any problem putting China or Russia in control of a body to monitor internet usage? Seriously, China as a nation and as a matter of foreign policy ALREADY proves daily that it cannot behave and is more than willing to engage in shady and underhanded (not to mention illegal) practices on the internet for their own gain, and certainly cannot be trusted to have any hand in running the internet. No, they can either play fair and accept the game as it is, or they can have their own internet and GTFO of ours - we don't need them regardless, and if Yahoo!'s stock dips a few points, well, good for them they get what they deserve for being in China's pocket, looking the other way while they play dirty pool.
As my prior post said, we brought the ball for EVERYONE to play with, fairly, by the rules as we established them. If you don't like it, go get your own ball and your own playing field and write your own damn rules. If the rest of the world somehow pulls together and creates a better, freer, safer internet, then the U.S. will lose out, and we will wind up joining WorldNet, but somehow I don't see that having a snowball's chance in a volcano of actually happening. Do you actually believe that the other nations of the world can be trusted to play fair? If so, you're a naive globalist leftist or another America basher who is just mad because we have the gall to be better off than other people and not give away everything we own - the fruits of our own hard labor - just because you feel you somehow deserve a piece of everyone else's pie without having to actually do anything to earn it. Especially when the fact of the matter is that we STILL give away more money in charitable donations both as a nation and as individuals to more people for more causes than anyone else. In fact, I'd be willing to bet (but am too lazy to google) that we as a nation give away more every year in international aid than does all of the UN combined, but still people bitch and moan about greedy America.
No, I will NOT shut up. Unlike pretty much every other nation in the world, I have a nigh unlimited right to free speech here in the U.S., and it's a continuing willingness to fight for freedom at all costs, especially my freedom of speech and freedom to possess firearms that gives me and my nation the ability to protect itself from tyranny both from without and from within that makes this nation great. For people like you who think "shut up, it can still play in your favor" is a viable model to work by, why don't you go live in China for a while, and see how well that works out in your favor when the death-wagon (read: mobile execution center) comes to your door because you viewed a website that expressed an opinion that their government doesn't like. The tree of liberty must occasionally be watered with the blood of both patriots and tyrants alike, and whether I water it with my own blood, ink, or pixels on a screen, I am happy to fight for the right ideals, and not just blindly accept some cynical view that "things aren't what they once were, so I should just accept what they are now."
Quite. Do we REALLY think that the UN member nations who want such Internet controls would even begin to take it seriously? Can we trust China to behave and not engage in serious DNS poisoning? If other nations don't like it, perhaps they should develop their own "internets" (it's made of tubes!). If they do a good job, maybe other nations will decide to join ChinaNet instead, but somehow I doubt it. Can you seriously trust even a small majority to make non-biased input on how the internet should best be run to the advantage of all involved?
Screw all this crap about what the majority wants - the majority wouldn't know what to do with it or how to do it while showing any other concern for anyone else. The U.S. developed and implemented the internet as we know it, and without our infrastructure and investment, it wouldn't exist in anywhere near the form it does today. While as a nation, the U.S. has some problems, I believe that we show a great deal more concern over privacy, security, reliability and usability for all than would any of the numerous communist or socialist nations that make up a healthy majority of the U.N. The U.S. is NOT a democracy (we're a republic, damnit, get your facts right) for a very good reason. Democracy is nothing more than mob-rule, and mob-rule doesn't ever see to the best interests of anyone but the mob (never underestimate the power of stupid people in large groups). Philosophers as far back as Plato have warned against democracies and "majority rule", and there is no reason to believe that such application to the internet would be any different, since then the majority of little technologically and economically irrelevant countries that hate the U.S. because we don't pander to their BS economic and social policies would certainly set straight out to screw the U.S. (and any other countries they think they can profit from) over as quickly as possible, and I don't see any good reason why that should be allowed to happen. We're the only nation whose laws and founding ideals are consistent with the ideals that founded and continue to define the internet, and I don't see any other nation as being fit to carry on those ideals, from the people at the bottom to the governmental laws, philosophies and representatives at the top... Australia with its excessive taxes, France with it's communist sympathies, Russia with it's massive corruption, or China with their well known censorship and willingness to sponsor illegal activities, no, I think the U.S. is the only nation remotely fit to govern the 'net.
No, the Internet has done just fine, for the most part, being run when, how and by whom it is, after decades of unimaginable and unprecedented growth. Only the U.S. philosophy of freedom at all costs has kept the Internet from becoming what China has done to the internet within it's own borders, and no one is ever going to convince me that there is any good reason to change or "fix" what isn't broken, esp. when those screaming for change are only doing it out of spite. Screw political football - play by our rules or not at all... The rules were very clear when you signed up for a cross-connect in the first place; you knew who the ball belonged to when you started playing the game. Just because there are more players in the game now doesn't mean suddenly that some communist ideal should be allowed to take over and just demand that the ball's owner give it up to everyone else out of some misguided and dangerously naive sense of community. We're not the bully in the yard, we brought the ball for everyone else to play with, so long as they play by the rules. Anyone who doesn't like it can get the hell off our playing field.
When EVERYBODY has $2000+ to spend on a good gaming computer that they are never going to do anything besides play one (lousy, imo) video game, and then another $600-$1000 computer that they use for their other tasks. By your line of thinking, they'll need a separate computer to open office docs in, another to do their accounting on, and yet another for basic safe web-browsing, since, G-d forbid any one of those programs where sensitive data might be entered could talk to any of those other programs, and most of them are capable of some kind of arbitrary code execution.
The whole point of ever faster and more powerfully robust computers is that you *can* multitask, or would you have us just return to the command prompt days. Or you could buy a console that has no other purpose than videogaming.
Regardless, people should be able to expect some level of privacy, as their computers reside within their homes, and I don't allow guests in my home to look in whatever closet they like, or just run my vacuum cleaner, read my mail, test my security system or turn up/down the air-conditioning at whim; I don't even let people in my home that I would vaguely suspect of doing such things, and I should be able to expect a similar level of civility from the people who make programs that they want me to pay them to use. They DAMN sure don't get an alarm code to my security system to just let themselves come and go at their whim, nor a camera to see what I'm doing just to make sure I'm not doing something they don't care for; when I leave my house and go over to THEIR home (i.e. log in to the game) then they are more than welcome to monitor what I do in THEIR home or place of business, but otherwise, all bets are off. I play PC games because they are so often superior to console games, but that doesn't mean I should have to give away control of my expensive gaming machine to play them, nor does it mean I should have to spend thousands of dollars in other computers just so one theoretically legit program can't take control of it. Just because I go play paintball at your place of business doesn't mean you get to put camera's in my home to make sure I didn't crank the PSI on my paintball guns above acceptable levels or freeze my paintballs - you discover those things via due diligence AT the painball place, and you kick the ass of anyone found cheating such a way, before you kick them out.
"Keep an open mind, but not so open your brains fall out." (origin of quote is debated)
"Any young person who is not a liberal is heartless; any old person who isn't a conservative is brainless." (also debated, often attributed to Winston Churchill)
I have to argue that in my experience, while liberals may be more immediately open-minded to new concepts in seeming comparison to conservatives, I think this perhaps has something to do with a conservative's prediliction towards deeper consideration and reflection at a logical level which presents a certain inflexibilitysure, but one rooted in deeper prior consideration and the ability to stand fast and firm in the face of opposition. The liberal, OTOH, while perhaps more open to new ideas, often accepts or rejects any such ideas based on immediate emotional appeal, and does not necessarily give new thoughts and concepts the kind of deeper examination they often demand.
Note, I do not refer specifically to current day liberals and conservatives en masse, but only to those I know through my own experiences - Liberals just seem more prone to accepting new, often fd-like ideas just because it sounds/feels good, new or different, and not because said ideas are necessarily good ones on anything but paper (if that). Also, I am NOT including the religious conservatives in examination above, as they are an entirely different kind of nutter, IMNSHO, just as prone to accepting any ideas that fit solely within their world-view, not because it's actually right or a good idea, but because it appeals to their emotions thru some indefinable sense of spirituality, which is rarely, if ever consistant with logic.
TodMinuit wrote: Allowing anyone to develop a Wii Channel -- even if it's only restricted access through something like RSS -- would only have a positive effect on the console.
That is, until people start to find and exploit flaws in it, allowing them to bypass copy protections and/or distribute malicious code via said rss feeds, or cheats that work in multi-player games, for that matter.
Personally, I don't want to have to waste any of the rather finite amount of CPU cycles available on my Wii to anti-virus / anti-malware / anti-cheat software; the Wii is not a hard-disk driven console, much less a much more powerful modern PC, with the ability to easily update its core software and save large numbers of updates/patches, in addition to protective software.
***Wrong. Police, military, and other authority figures are not just your average joe. They are higher, and must be treated as such. Just be glad we have social mobility so anyone can be an authority figure.***
I don't buy that. They are all just as falliable and just as human as everyone else. No matter WHAT standard you hold them to, they are still human and will behave like one. We hold the leaders of our countries to higher standards too, and they regularly prove that they make mistakes like everyone else, are greedy ajd self-serving, like everyone else, and the true humanitarians with good intentions are just as rare IN those roles as they are rare OUTSIDE them, which is to say they are a very small percentage of the population. Just because a police officer goes to some little academy somewhere and someone givens them a badge, what, in all honesty, makes their word any more believable than mine? I have been witness to or on the receiving end of lies told by a law enforcement officer on numerous occasions. While many of them are just people trying to do a job, there are many of them who are corrupt, incompetent, excessively violent, etc., as they're just a cross-section of our population anyway, more or less. Besides the true humanitarians or those with a history conducive to making a person particularly interersted in preventing crime and protecting people, who else is willing to take low pay for a hard, stressful and dangerous job for low pay and almost zero respect from the people they are expected to protect?
But seriously, is this a surprise? IIRC, wasn't Yahoo! quite complicit in filtering for The Great Firewall of China? I believe much more is being filtered, as I have had numerous messages to friends through YIM! simply disappear... I know, because the message not going thru caused me to either call, IRC, or yell across the apartment at the persons I was trying to message, and in all those cases, a URL was involved; thinking back on it, I wonder: has anyone else had a problem sending Photobucket links?
Also, in response to a previous poster who said something about how the technology to filter should never be developed or made known that it can be done on demand: You fail - The academic community frowns on your conclusion. The ability to do these things is often devloped concurrently with the rest of the software/hardware/etc., based on lessons learned from BBS'es and IRC and the first ISP's. The ability to filter and censor a network is critical to its operation in many ways and for many reasons (at least 65535 reasons), to prevent things like exploits and spam, or deal with hackers, etc. While I believe Internet Neutrality is important (I've writeen several papers on it recently), some argue that in many ways the Internet has never actually been truly neutral, some authors referring to a policy of "don't filter until/unless you have to" - implied is the ability to do so on demand when you absolutely have to. From a network engineering standpoint, it's not wise too have too many such rules running, lest you impact performance, so it isn't a good idea to allow Joe Schmoe in tech support or John Blow in the NOC to have the ability to implment these kinds of things just from a technical standpoint, other considerations (such as legal) aside. But seriously, don't fool yourself, pretty much any and every hosted service you use possesses the ability to eavesdrop on, filter, and/or censor you.
To wit: "ECHELON can capture radio and satellite communications, telephone calls, faxes, e-mails and other data streams nearly anywhere in the world and includes computer automated analysis and sorting of intercepts."
"In terms of computing, where the adult human brain is roughly equivalent to 1E+18 operations/sec., and the brain stores roughly one petabyte of data, even an abacus is a more complex computational device in terms of processing power and even data storagethan is a 31-day old fetus' brain."
From a Unesco Courier article siderbar: "According to Moore's Law, computing power doubles every two years. By around 2020, a personal computer will have exactly the same processing power as a single human brain."
I remember reading something similiar ages ago, though the projected date was somewhere between 2020 and 2025, allowing for variances in the actual rate of progess before a desktop-grade PC would reach the roughly 1 billion billion ops/sec @ 1 petabyte storage that was the stated theoretical digital equivalent.
The processing power of the system of neurons in the brain can be roughly evaluated by the number of events which may occur in this system per second. The number of neurons is about 10e+10 and their switching time is about 10e+2 sec, so the number of events per second is about 10e+12. This figure is comparable with the number of operations per second in massively parallel computer systems approaching the teraop barrier. Thus, the information processing power of the system of neurons does not drastically exceed that available through modern microelectronic technology. In the expanded construction suggested in [2] the number of binary events per second may reach 10e+23 to 10e+25. However, as in all massively parallel systems a problem arises whether a substantial portion of this estimated raw computational power can be effectually utilized.
Poster's note: Obviously, many of these connections are utilized for non-cognitive functions are are tied in to motor skills. I believe the original figure I quoted (10e+18) is meant to represent available capacity outside of pure maintenance functions (i.e., it does not include the neural equivalent of TCP overhead, etc. [depends on whether you're running WinDome or CerebRIX, actual mileage may vary depending upon the amount of OEM RAM you came with])
Come on... Laugh! You know it was funny ^.^
Memory Capacity
The capacity of the long term human memory is virtually unlimited. According to von Neumann [5], estimated by the amount of information which can be transferred to a human brain during its lifetime, the lower bound of this capacity is about 2.8× 1020 bits. To be stored in the brain of about 103 cm3 this requires density of informational storage about at least 3× 1017 bits/cm-3. The time of content-addressable retrieval is rather short and essentially independent from the amount of stored information. Once recorded, information in the brain is supposed to be retained permanently. Thus, images don't fade with time and can be easily recognized over decades.
This last is an oversimplifcation without solid root in neurobiology. Due to a browser crash, I lost what I'd just added here, but it is easily shown that the brain most certainly performs it's own regular disk-maintnance (delete old files, defrag, index and cross-correlate data, and delete cookies and other temporary files that have been determined to be irrelvant though indexing and defragging - such as excatly what you paid for breakfast at McD's last Tuesday or what color socks the bosses' secretary wore yesterday) and does not possess anywhere the necessary capacity to store in digital detail every event of every day.
"By the year 2020, your $1,000 personal computer will have the processing power of the human brain--20 million billion calculations per second (100 billion neurons times 1,000 connections per neuron times 200 calculations per second per connection). By 2030, it will take a village of human brains to match a $1,000 computer. By 2050, $1,000 worth of computing will equal the processing power of all human brains on earth."
This seems to be a generally expected figure, though t
While your quote in context is humorous, it does remind me to mention that a handfull of neurons does not in any way equate intelligence. In terms of computing, where the adult human brain is roughly equivalent to 1E+18 operations/sec., and the brain stores roughly one petabyte of data, even an abacus is a more complex computational device in terms of processing power and even data storage. I'm sure it has some remarkably limited function at that point, but nowhere near enough so to make any real difference to the abortion debate.
I had something very similiar happen to me as well, though it was not the battery for my nikon (long discharged and no problems), but rather the battery for my Audiovox 6600 PocketPC. I had cancelled the service for which the phone was branded and purchased a different a different device to use for the phone purpose. While out one night and without a charger, the phone died, and I didn't charge it for a day. The next day, upon trying to remove it from the metal case/shell, I found it wedged tight. When I finally managed to remove the thing, I discovered a bulge in the plastic on the back of the battery, and on removing the battery, the foil casing on the underside swelled out, making the battery nearly twice it's size. I, too, dropped the battery into a pyrex container with a lid, and then that into a ceramic jar (I have an 50's era college chemistry set that came in very handy there... The s/o finally quit complaining for me to throw it out that night ^.^).
It is irresponsible for people to post ways of bypassing the security restrictions a sovereign nation has enacted upon its people. If the Chinese people don't like the way their government is restricting their access to information then they have a moral obligation to overthrow that government, either peacefully via voting in the next election, or by force using a militia formed from the people. By showing the Chinese people ways to exist comfortably within the restrictions imposed by an immoral government we're not helping them to reach a better place in life.. namely a free and democratic Republic of China.
Hmmm, yes, in a nation where valid elections don't exist and none but the military have firearms (which they have proved more than willing to use on its citizens)? Are you one of those people who argue that, regardless of other considerations, the United States has committed a terrible crime in Iraq by liberating a people who "have no history nor understanding of freedom"? Yes, I recognize the fact that China has basically been a communist or autocratic state for the near entirety of its very long history, but that doesn't mean the Chinese people yearn for freedom any less than the founding fathers of the U.S.A. did; The simply have considerbly less opportunity at much greater risk and difficulty to effect the desired changes, what with the current government so heavily entrenched in such a heavily populated nation. See Hong Kong and Taiwan, for example. Or do you also think that our pledges of defense for Taiwan are also irresponsible, since we are interfering in the affairs of state of a sovereign nation? The same way that France and Germany interfered in British affairs of state in the mid-1700's? I think history will bear out that most revolutions are doomed to failure, and especially those conducted without outside aid from an ersatz ally or other sympathetic nation. With great freedom comes great responsibility, and as members of the freest nation in modern history, it is encumbant upon us to help others realize that freedom where ever and whenever possible, especially when we can do so with as little bloodshed and loss-of-life as possible... Or should we just go ahead and go into China, guns akimbo, blazing all the way? We won the economic war with the Soviet Russians and are losing said economic war with China rapidly. What other choice do we have besides the conduct of an information war with hopes of helping those people to see that there is considerably greater truth to be had than what their government (via Xinhua) feeds them?
How else besides helping them (and those who are already free) to find ways of disseminating the most truly powerful weapon in history - ideas - to other people? How else but to help them find ways to tell others that such a thing as freedom and personal liberty actually exists? How else besides helping them find channels of communication with others to sow the seeds of dissent and plan said revolts without being caught and murdered in a state sponsored mobile execution center? Do you really think that - in a nation modern enough to have fighter jets and tanks - going back to the Paul Revere days and using a signalling lantern ("One if by day, two if by night") is going to work (and no "security through obscurity" references, please)? Revolutionary America simply cannot be compared to modern day China, and in a nation with State run newspapers and television, what better way to communicate the ideas of freedom and equality except via the internet?
Would you rather we just fly C-130's over China and dump M-16's out the back? This has nothing to do with "showing the Chinese people ways to exist comfortably within the restrictions imposed", and is entirely a way of showing those people - inside and outside China - interested in spreading freedom across the globe how to penetrate the defenses of a despotic regime and spread those ideas to others who may be receptive to them.
i am neither a lawyer nor a Chinese resident, so I am not sure, but I don't think that it is illegal. If someone in China wants to connect to a server in the USA, and that server happened to be told to ignore reset packets from China, then that can't be illegal. If a Chinese citizen's computer just happened to be configured to ignore reset packets, then I doubt that it will be illegal. Having said that, actually looking at forbidden content is probably illegal.
The problem hinges on the fact that the is no (enforceable) law preventing the Chinese government from doing what it likes to who it likes that does anything they don't like. Remember, they require no warrants, no subpoenae, and no trial. They only have to notice that you have accessed something they don't like enough to pay attention to you, and you're toast (see above mentioned death vans).
Perhaps, as another poster mentioned above, the Chinese will restrain themselves up unto the 2008 Olympics, but I doubt it. Again, see the above death wagons, which "look like any other police van." Also, whoever said they haven't got the resources is deluding themselves. If the RIAA has the resources to track people downloading illegally (though the lack the resources to document and prosecute anywhere near the majority), there are 1.3 billion with a "B" people in China. Even though you don't hear about it much, they assault US networks (telecom and government) with regularity. I'm sure they have enough people to monitor home traffic closely enough to suit their purposes - remember, all it takes is a small app to parse logs for forbidden traffic in the past X days or whatever. Combined with random live monitoring and historical traffic analysis, I'm sure they can monitor more than enough to make it as unsafe to commit thought crime on the internet as it is for the average American to get away with hacking the average website hosted by a paranoid provider. I rather doubt they care about anyone posting on/. too much (especially if you are a foreign national simply visiting family there), but if they even begin to think you're a subvesrive engaged in treason or sedition, pO.of, you're done, no proof required. Stop, do not pass Go, do not collect $200. Go with the nice men in blue uniforms directly to the "police van that looks like any other" parked right outside your front door.
Wow, at that speed, it would take you nearly a week to get through the gallon!
Longer, as it's approximately 4 days 14 hours from atlanta to juneau for 3,776 miles traveled at reasonable highway speeeds. Unless you drove for 7 days straight.
no, because while diamond is hard, in certain directions it is considerably more fracile and therefore not at all suited to making a glass replacement, as cost will always be prohbitive when compared to sticking some sand into a furnace for a few minutes for any standard application. The potential for either bit of research, though, is super-scratch resistant coastings (in the case of artificial diamonds) and high-strength and density glasses for specialized applications, such as in heavy industry or aerospace, and then only in instances where performance under stress is the defining factor, not cost. Barring a huge revolution in nanotech in the next 50 years, we're never going to see either in daily applications such as IPod screens and car windshields.
Slashdot Mirror
This is why I have long said that we need to fire each and every last federal-level politician and bureaucrat, then take a survey of the American public to find out who would be interested in holding/running for public office, and then immediately and irrevocably ban all those people from holding office too.
I'm with you. Look at my user number - I've been a regular /. reader for quite a long time, and haven't previously had any real reason to bash it over the years. The site has had it's issues from time to time, but this was just... glaringly ignorant.
Just as you may, in a way, know a thing, but it often takes someone or something pointing it out in order to make that thing plain and obvious to you in its application, it is often the same with any form of writing or journalism where continual or poignant reminders of these things may be necessary to keep one on track in their writing, instead of just blandly saying "Wow, this is sensational... I think I'll just pass it along as it was sent to me with no real credible research, validation of the claims' truth, or any reasonable editorializing... Look, I posted an article; I've done my days work and justified my (likely 6-figure) salary."
/.) should find these attributes just THAT much more important than would, say, someone writing the Food & Dining section in the local pulp-rag. If I were making CmdrTaco's salary, I think I'd be a little more interested in justifying said wages and do a better job at being a journalist, as opposed to "CmdrTaco, approver of random FUD." Maybe he should change his nick to "Mordac, preventer of information (technology)." I think he might find his job and life a tad more fulfilling if he weren't just spewing out whatever waste comes across his desk.
As for your follow-up statement, there is an incredibly relevant quote up today on my Google homepage quotes of the day:
"Science is facts; just as houses are made of stones, so is science made of facts; but a pile of stones is not a house and a collection of facts is not necessarily science."
- Henri Poincare
All I'm calling for here is a reasonable level of honesty, integrity... Well, maybe a little bit of actual hard-work at journalism and editing from a group of people who are apparently only pretending to be journalists, and instead are nothing more than George Jetson style button-pushers who post up anything that might increase readership and posting counts, instead of actually pushing out thoughtful and insightful news.
Clarity, consistency, honesty and intellectual integrity are not the domain of science and engineering alone... While those traits are useful in those pursuits, as in... well, ANY of life's worthwhile pursuits, science and engineering OFTEN falls short of those goals, and they are just as important when relaying information or attempting to communicate clearly as they are anywhere else.
Besides, you further my point for me... A journalist or editor whose specific focus *IS* science and engineering (as in
Please mod parent article flamebait/troll.
/. and it's audience) would benefit greatly from his taking a few journalism courses. He's got the hang of sensationalism alright, but perhaps he should examine the finer aspects of journalism like clarity, consistency, intellectual honesty, in-depth research providing valuable insights to the reader instead of FUD, etc., etc. It's not as if he hasn't been at this a few years now... You'd think that, being a commercial website focused on delivering news and information to geeks, that, just perhaps, by now they'd have learned how to do a little research and actually provide some real information and intelligent articles instead of just blindly passing along whatever some troll dragged up off of a random news site.
/. editors are, with the potential for good, community conscious editors to rise up from the user pool who have some concept of what "news for nerds" really means, which would involve real information based on honest inquiry and research instead of just forwarding along unfounded FUD. Give a stable selection of long-time readers with positive karma and posting scores the ability to see articles before they're posted and vote on their relevance, accuracy and "truthiness" before they're slammed out to the general readership... and maybe even the ability to edit those submissions into something that actually resembles news and information, and we might have something worthwhile going here. As it stands, /. is every day becoming more like a blog or sci/tech oriented version of del.icio.us, and less a medium for reliable, thought-provoking news and information.
Would you really expect anything less from CmdrTaco? Not that I think the people who work for the major media and went through 4 years of it in college are doing any better a job, but I think that he (and thereby
You know, actually, I think a system to apply mod points to articles themselves and perhaps not just the person who passed along the article, but the editor who posted it would be a nice addition. Add karma into the mix, and perhaps we'll eventually see who the best of the
The U.S. is NOT a democracy (we're a republic, damnit, get your facts right)
Seeing as how a republic is "a government having a chief of state who is not a monarchy" a democracy can very well be a republic.
Ah, allow me to clarify... We are a "Representative Republic", which is a different thing altogether than a democracy, where the will of the masses is not necessarily the will of the nation. Why? Because as I sad before, "never underestimate the power of stupid people in large groups." When this nation was founded, it was believed (and true, then, as it still is today) that the average citizen simply was not educated and experienced enough (especially in international affairs) to make well reasoned, rational decisions on how their nation should be governed. This is why we still have the electoral college. The "people" are still too naive and ignorant, on average, to have any say on their nations governance... I mean, seriously... The average American citizen right now doesn't know who the Secretary of State is, but they think that "Survivor" or "Jackass" is quality entertainment, and I don't know about you, but those damned sure aren't the people I want having a hand in decisions about my nations foreign or domestic policies.Uh, someone mod parent flamebait, as well as ignorant.
My views are not what is fatally outdated, it is your poor, overly cynical philosophies and lack of motivational ethics that are fatally flawed and incredibly dangerous; I can but hope that you don't pass such nonsense on to your children, having them think that this nation should be some kind of mob-rule democracy who should just give everything up to any majority just because they said "I want, gimme."
The people who built the internet still have a big role in its design going forward, and I don't know where you're from, but AFAIC, "freedom at all costs" is still MY ideal and the ideal this nation was founded on. If you don't like it, go to China; me, I'll be happy to fight tooth and nail for those beliefs while you're busy trying to sell my country out to the communists and socialists and those bunch of corrupt bastards at the UN... Do you REALLY think that a governing body that would appoint a nation like Libya to the head of it's human rights council would have any problem putting China or Russia in control of a body to monitor internet usage? Seriously, China as a nation and as a matter of foreign policy ALREADY proves daily that it cannot behave and is more than willing to engage in shady and underhanded (not to mention illegal) practices on the internet for their own gain, and certainly cannot be trusted to have any hand in running the internet. No, they can either play fair and accept the game as it is, or they can have their own internet and GTFO of ours - we don't need them regardless, and if Yahoo!'s stock dips a few points, well, good for them they get what they deserve for being in China's pocket, looking the other way while they play dirty pool.
As my prior post said, we brought the ball for EVERYONE to play with, fairly, by the rules as we established them. If you don't like it, go get your own ball and your own playing field and write your own damn rules. If the rest of the world somehow pulls together and creates a better, freer, safer internet, then the U.S. will lose out, and we will wind up joining WorldNet, but somehow I don't see that having a snowball's chance in a volcano of actually happening. Do you actually believe that the other nations of the world can be trusted to play fair? If so, you're a naive globalist leftist or another America basher who is just mad because we have the gall to be better off than other people and not give away everything we own - the fruits of our own hard labor - just because you feel you somehow deserve a piece of everyone else's pie without having to actually do anything to earn it. Especially when the fact of the matter is that we STILL give away more money in charitable donations both as a nation and as individuals to more people for more causes than anyone else. In fact, I'd be willing to bet (but am too lazy to google) that we as a nation give away more every year in international aid than does all of the UN combined, but still people bitch and moan about greedy America.
No, I will NOT shut up. Unlike pretty much every other nation in the world, I have a nigh unlimited right to free speech here in the U.S., and it's a continuing willingness to fight for freedom at all costs, especially my freedom of speech and freedom to possess firearms that gives me and my nation the ability to protect itself from tyranny both from without and from within that makes this nation great. For people like you who think "shut up, it can still play in your favor" is a viable model to work by, why don't you go live in China for a while, and see how well that works out in your favor when the death-wagon (read: mobile execution center) comes to your door because you viewed a website that expressed an opinion that their government doesn't like. The tree of liberty must occasionally be watered with the blood of both patriots and tyrants alike, and whether I water it with my own blood, ink, or pixels on a screen, I am happy to fight for the right ideals, and not just blindly accept some cynical view that "things aren't what they once were, so I should just accept what they are now."
Quite. Do we REALLY think that the UN member nations who want such Internet controls would even begin to take it seriously? Can we trust China to behave and not engage in serious DNS poisoning? If other nations don't like it, perhaps they should develop their own "internets" (it's made of tubes!). If they do a good job, maybe other nations will decide to join ChinaNet instead, but somehow I doubt it. Can you seriously trust even a small majority to make non-biased input on how the internet should best be run to the advantage of all involved?
Screw all this crap about what the majority wants - the majority wouldn't know what to do with it or how to do it while showing any other concern for anyone else. The U.S. developed and implemented the internet as we know it, and without our infrastructure and investment, it wouldn't exist in anywhere near the form it does today. While as a nation, the U.S. has some problems, I believe that we show a great deal more concern over privacy, security, reliability and usability for all than would any of the numerous communist or socialist nations that make up a healthy majority of the U.N. The U.S. is NOT a democracy (we're a republic, damnit, get your facts right) for a very good reason. Democracy is nothing more than mob-rule, and mob-rule doesn't ever see to the best interests of anyone but the mob (never underestimate the power of stupid people in large groups). Philosophers as far back as Plato have warned against democracies and "majority rule", and there is no reason to believe that such application to the internet would be any different, since then the majority of little technologically and economically irrelevant countries that hate the U.S. because we don't pander to their BS economic and social policies would certainly set straight out to screw the U.S. (and any other countries they think they can profit from) over as quickly as possible, and I don't see any good reason why that should be allowed to happen. We're the only nation whose laws and founding ideals are consistent with the ideals that founded and continue to define the internet, and I don't see any other nation as being fit to carry on those ideals, from the people at the bottom to the governmental laws, philosophies and representatives at the top... Australia with its excessive taxes, France with it's communist sympathies, Russia with it's massive corruption, or China with their well known censorship and willingness to sponsor illegal activities, no, I think the U.S. is the only nation remotely fit to govern the 'net.
No, the Internet has done just fine, for the most part, being run when, how and by whom it is, after decades of unimaginable and unprecedented growth. Only the U.S. philosophy of freedom at all costs has kept the Internet from becoming what China has done to the internet within it's own borders, and no one is ever going to convince me that there is any good reason to change or "fix" what isn't broken, esp. when those screaming for change are only doing it out of spite. Screw political football - play by our rules or not at all... The rules were very clear when you signed up for a cross-connect in the first place; you knew who the ball belonged to when you started playing the game. Just because there are more players in the game now doesn't mean suddenly that some communist ideal should be allowed to take over and just demand that the ball's owner give it up to everyone else out of some misguided and dangerously naive sense of community. We're not the bully in the yard, we brought the ball for everyone else to play with, so long as they play by the rules. Anyone who doesn't like it can get the hell off our playing field.
When EVERYBODY has $2000+ to spend on a good gaming computer that they are never going to do anything besides play one (lousy, imo) video game, and then another $600-$1000 computer that they use for their other tasks. By your line of thinking, they'll need a separate computer to open office docs in, another to do their accounting on, and yet another for basic safe web-browsing, since, G-d forbid any one of those programs where sensitive data might be entered could talk to any of those other programs, and most of them are capable of some kind of arbitrary code execution.
The whole point of ever faster and more powerfully robust computers is that you *can* multitask, or would you have us just return to the command prompt days. Or you could buy a console that has no other purpose than videogaming.
Regardless, people should be able to expect some level of privacy, as their computers reside within their homes, and I don't allow guests in my home to look in whatever closet they like, or just run my vacuum cleaner, read my mail, test my security system or turn up/down the air-conditioning at whim; I don't even let people in my home that I would vaguely suspect of doing such things, and I should be able to expect a similar level of civility from the people who make programs that they want me to pay them to use. They DAMN sure don't get an alarm code to my security system to just let themselves come and go at their whim, nor a camera to see what I'm doing just to make sure I'm not doing something they don't care for; when I leave my house and go over to THEIR home (i.e. log in to the game) then they are more than welcome to monitor what I do in THEIR home or place of business, but otherwise, all bets are off. I play PC games because they are so often superior to console games, but that doesn't mean I should have to give away control of my expensive gaming machine to play them, nor does it mean I should have to spend thousands of dollars in other computers just so one theoretically legit program can't take control of it. Just because I go play paintball at your place of business doesn't mean you get to put camera's in my home to make sure I didn't crank the PSI on my paintball guns above acceptable levels or freeze my paintballs - you discover those things via due diligence AT the painball place, and you kick the ass of anyone found cheating such a way, before you kick them out.
No, in reference to P.F.'s 'The Wall', I believe you are looking for "The Nipple Cut."
"Keep an open mind, but not so open your brains fall out." (origin of quote is debated)
"Any young person who is not a liberal is heartless; any old person who isn't a conservative is brainless." (also debated, often attributed to Winston Churchill)
I have to argue that in my experience, while liberals may be more immediately open-minded to new concepts in seeming comparison to conservatives, I think this perhaps has something to do with a conservative's prediliction towards deeper consideration and reflection at a logical level which presents a certain inflexibilitysure, but one rooted in deeper prior consideration and the ability to stand fast and firm in the face of opposition. The liberal, OTOH, while perhaps more open to new ideas, often accepts or rejects any such ideas based on immediate emotional appeal, and does not necessarily give new thoughts and concepts the kind of deeper examination they often demand.
Note, I do not refer specifically to current day liberals and conservatives en masse, but only to those I know through my own experiences - Liberals just seem more prone to accepting new, often fd-like ideas just because it sounds/feels good, new or different, and not because said ideas are necessarily good ones on anything but paper (if that). Also, I am NOT including the religious conservatives in examination above, as they are an entirely different kind of nutter, IMNSHO, just as prone to accepting any ideas that fit solely within their world-view, not because it's actually right or a good idea, but because it appeals to their emotions thru some indefinable sense of spirituality, which is rarely, if ever consistant with logic.
TodMinuit wrote:
Allowing anyone to develop a Wii Channel -- even if it's only restricted access through something like RSS -- would only have a positive effect on the console.
That is, until people start to find and exploit flaws in it, allowing them to bypass copy protections and/or distribute malicious code via said rss feeds, or cheats that work in multi-player games, for that matter.
Personally, I don't want to have to waste any of the rather finite amount of CPU cycles available on my Wii to anti-virus / anti-malware / anti-cheat software; the Wii is not a hard-disk driven console, much less a much more powerful modern PC, with the ability to easily update its core software and save large numbers of updates/patches, in addition to protective software.
***Wrong.
Police, military, and other authority figures are not just your average joe. They are higher, and must be treated as such. Just be glad we have social mobility so anyone can be an authority figure.***
I don't buy that. They are all just as falliable and just as human as everyone else. No matter WHAT standard you hold them to, they are still human and will behave like one. We hold the leaders of our countries to higher standards too, and they regularly prove that they make mistakes like everyone else, are greedy ajd self-serving, like everyone else, and the true humanitarians with good intentions are just as rare IN those roles as they are rare OUTSIDE them, which is to say they are a very small percentage of the population. Just because a police officer goes to some little academy somewhere and someone givens them a badge, what, in all honesty, makes their word any more believable than mine? I have been witness to or on the receiving end of lies told by a law enforcement officer on numerous occasions. While many of them are just people trying to do a job, there are many of them who are corrupt, incompetent, excessively violent, etc., as they're just a cross-section of our population anyway, more or less. Besides the true humanitarians or those with a history conducive to making a person particularly interersted in preventing crime and protecting people, who else is willing to take low pay for a hard, stressful and dangerous job for low pay and almost zero respect from the people they are expected to protect?
Too many secrets! (good movie!)
But seriously, is this a surprise? IIRC, wasn't Yahoo! quite complicit in filtering for The Great Firewall of China? I believe much more is being filtered, as I have had numerous messages to friends through YIM! simply disappear... I know, because the message not going thru caused me to either call, IRC, or yell across the apartment at the persons I was trying to message, and in all those cases, a URL was involved; thinking back on it, I wonder: has anyone else had a problem sending Photobucket links?
Also, in response to a previous poster who said something about how the technology to filter should never be developed or made known that it can be done on demand: You fail - The academic community frowns on your conclusion. The ability to do these things is often devloped concurrently with the rest of the software/hardware/etc., based on lessons learned from BBS'es and IRC and the first ISP's. The ability to filter and censor a network is critical to its operation in many ways and for many reasons (at least 65535 reasons), to prevent things like exploits and spam, or deal with hackers, etc. While I believe Internet Neutrality is important (I've writeen several papers on it recently), some argue that in many ways the Internet has never actually been truly neutral, some authors referring to a policy of "don't filter until/unless you have to" - implied is the ability to do so on demand when you absolutely have to. From a network engineering standpoint, it's not wise too have too many such rules running, lest you impact performance, so it isn't a good idea to allow Joe Schmoe in tech support or John Blow in the NOC to have the ability to implment these kinds of things just from a technical standpoint, other considerations (such as legal) aside. But seriously, don't fool yourself, pretty much any and every hosted service you use possesses the ability to eavesdrop on, filter, and/or censor you.
One word:
ECHELON.
To wit: "ECHELON can capture radio and satellite communications, telephone calls, faxes, e-mails and other data streams nearly anywhere in the world and includes computer automated analysis and sorting of intercepts."
Thank you ^.^ I do try my best. Now if I could just get a moderator to take note =)
Obviously, that statement should have read:
"In terms of computing, where the adult human brain is roughly equivalent to 1E+18 operations/sec., and the brain stores roughly one petabyte of data, even an abacus is a more complex computational device in terms of processing power and even data storage than is a 31-day old fetus' brain."
I remember reading something similiar ages ago, though the projected date was somewhere between 2020 and 2025, allowing for variances in the actual rate of progess before a desktop-grade PC would reach the roughly 1 billion billion ops/sec @ 1 petabyte storage that was the stated theoretical digital equivalent.
From a 1993 article in Nanobiology Magazine:
Processing Power
The processing power of the system of neurons in the brain can be roughly evaluated by the number of events which may occur in this system per second. The number of neurons is about 10e+10 and their switching time is about 10e+2 sec, so the number of events per second is about 10e+12. This figure is comparable with the number of operations per second in massively parallel computer systems approaching the teraop barrier. Thus, the information processing power of the system of neurons does not drastically exceed that available through modern microelectronic technology. In the expanded construction suggested in [2] the number of binary events per second may reach 10e+23 to 10e+25. However, as in all massively parallel systems a problem arises whether a substantial portion of this estimated raw computational power can be effectually utilized.
Poster's note: Obviously, many of these connections are utilized for non-cognitive functions are are tied in to motor skills. I believe the original figure I quoted (10e+18) is meant to represent available capacity outside of pure maintenance functions (i.e., it does not include the neural equivalent of TCP overhead, etc. [depends on whether you're running WinDome or CerebRIX, actual mileage may vary depending upon the amount of OEM RAM you came with])
Come on... Laugh! You know it was funny ^.^
Memory Capacity
The capacity of the long term human memory is virtually unlimited. According to von Neumann [5], estimated by the amount of information which can be transferred to a human brain during its lifetime, the lower bound of this capacity is about 2.8× 1020 bits. To be stored in the brain of about 103 cm3 this requires density of informational storage about at least 3× 1017 bits/cm-3. The time of content-addressable retrieval is rather short and essentially independent from the amount of stored information. Once recorded, information in the brain is supposed to be retained permanently. Thus, images don't fade with time and can be easily recognized over decades.
This last is an oversimplifcation without solid root in neurobiology. Due to a browser crash, I lost what I'd just added here, but it is easily shown that the brain most certainly performs it's own regular disk-maintnance (delete old files, defrag, index and cross-correlate data, and delete cookies and other temporary files that have been determined to be irrelvant though indexing and defragging - such as excatly what you paid for breakfast at McD's last Tuesday or what color socks the bosses' secretary wore yesterday) and does not possess anywhere the necessary capacity to store in digital detail every event of every day.
From a PsychologyToday article:
"By the year 2020, your $1,000 personal computer will have the processing power of the human brain--20 million billion calculations per second (100 billion neurons times 1,000 connections per neuron times 200 calculations per second per connection). By 2030, it will take a village of human brains to match a $1,000 computer. By 2050, $1,000 worth of computing will equal the processing power of all human brains on earth."
This seems to be a generally expected figure, though t
While your quote in context is humorous, it does remind me to mention that a handfull of neurons does not in any way equate intelligence. In terms of computing, where the adult human brain is roughly equivalent to 1E+18 operations/sec., and the brain stores roughly one petabyte of data, even an abacus is a more complex computational device in terms of processing power and even data storage. I'm sure it has some remarkably limited function at that point, but nowhere near enough so to make any real difference to the abortion debate.
It all depends on the restraint of those who apply the law.
You expect RESTRAINT from judges?
I for one welcome our new totalitarian legal dictator overlords...
Oh wait, they aren't new... *%^^*%$&^%$!!!
I had something very similiar happen to me as well, though it was not the battery for my nikon (long discharged and no problems), but rather the battery for my Audiovox 6600 PocketPC. I had cancelled the service for which the phone was branded and purchased a different a different device to use for the phone purpose. While out one night and without a charger, the phone died, and I didn't charge it for a day. The next day, upon trying to remove it from the metal case/shell, I found it wedged tight. When I finally managed to remove the thing, I discovered a bulge in the plastic on the back of the battery, and on removing the battery, the foil casing on the underside swelled out, making the battery nearly twice it's size. I, too, dropped the battery into a pyrex container with a lid, and then that into a ceramic jar (I have an 50's era college chemistry set that came in very handy there... The s/o finally quit complaining for me to throw it out that night ^.^).
It is irresponsible for people to post ways of bypassing the security restrictions a sovereign nation has enacted upon its people. If the Chinese people don't like the way their government is restricting their access to information then they have a moral obligation to overthrow that government, either peacefully via voting in the next election, or by force using a militia formed from the people. By showing the Chinese people ways to exist comfortably within the restrictions imposed by an immoral government we're not helping them to reach a better place in life.. namely a free and democratic Republic of China.
Hmmm, yes, in a nation where valid elections don't exist and none but the military have firearms (which they have proved more than willing to use on its citizens)? Are you one of those people who argue that, regardless of other considerations, the United States has committed a terrible crime in Iraq by liberating a people who "have no history nor understanding of freedom"? Yes, I recognize the fact that China has basically been a communist or autocratic state for the near entirety of its very long history, but that doesn't mean the Chinese people yearn for freedom any less than the founding fathers of the U.S.A. did; The simply have considerbly less opportunity at much greater risk and difficulty to effect the desired changes, what with the current government so heavily entrenched in such a heavily populated nation. See Hong Kong and Taiwan, for example. Or do you also think that our pledges of defense for Taiwan are also irresponsible, since we are interfering in the affairs of state of a sovereign nation? The same way that France and Germany interfered in British affairs of state in the mid-1700's? I think history will bear out that most revolutions are doomed to failure, and especially those conducted without outside aid from an ersatz ally or other sympathetic nation. With great freedom comes great responsibility, and as members of the freest nation in modern history, it is encumbant upon us to help others realize that freedom where ever and whenever possible, especially when we can do so with as little bloodshed and loss-of-life as possible... Or should we just go ahead and go into China, guns akimbo, blazing all the way? We won the economic war with the Soviet Russians and are losing said economic war with China rapidly. What other choice do we have besides the conduct of an information war with hopes of helping those people to see that there is considerably greater truth to be had than what their government (via Xinhua) feeds them?
How else besides helping them (and those who are already free) to find ways of disseminating the most truly powerful weapon in history - ideas - to other people? How else but to help them find ways to tell others that such a thing as freedom and personal liberty actually exists? How else besides helping them find channels of communication with others to sow the seeds of dissent and plan said revolts without being caught and murdered in a state sponsored mobile execution center? Do you really think that - in a nation modern enough to have fighter jets and tanks - going back to the Paul Revere days and using a signalling lantern ("One if by day, two if by night") is going to work (and no "security through obscurity" references, please)? Revolutionary America simply cannot be compared to modern day China, and in a nation with State run newspapers and television, what better way to communicate the ideas of freedom and equality except via the internet?
Would you rather we just fly C-130's over China and dump M-16's out the back? This has nothing to do with "showing the Chinese people ways to exist comfortably within the restrictions imposed", and is entirely a way of showing those people - inside and outside China - interested in spreading freedom across the globe how to penetrate the defenses of a despotic regime and spread those ideas to others who may be receptive to them.
i am neither a lawyer nor a Chinese resident, so I am not sure, but I don't think that it is illegal. If someone in China wants to connect to a server in the USA, and that server happened to be told to ignore reset packets from China, then that can't be illegal. If a Chinese citizen's computer just happened to be configured to ignore reset packets, then I doubt that it will be illegal. Having said that, actually looking at forbidden content is probably illegal.
/. too much (especially if you are a foreign national simply visiting family there), but if they even begin to think you're a subvesrive engaged in treason or sedition, pO.of, you're done, no proof required. Stop, do not pass Go, do not collect $200. Go with the nice men in blue uniforms directly to the "police van that looks like any other" parked right outside your front door.
The problem hinges on the fact that the is no (enforceable) law preventing the Chinese government from doing what it likes to who it likes that does anything they don't like. Remember, they require no warrants, no subpoenae, and no trial. They only have to notice that you have accessed something they don't like enough to pay attention to you, and you're toast (see above mentioned death vans).
Perhaps, as another poster mentioned above, the Chinese will restrain themselves up unto the 2008 Olympics, but I doubt it. Again, see the above death wagons, which "look like any other police van." Also, whoever said they haven't got the resources is deluding themselves. If the RIAA has the resources to track people downloading illegally (though the lack the resources to document and prosecute anywhere near the majority), there are 1.3 billion with a "B" people in China. Even though you don't hear about it much, they assault US networks (telecom and government) with regularity. I'm sure they have enough people to monitor home traffic closely enough to suit their purposes - remember, all it takes is a small app to parse logs for forbidden traffic in the past X days or whatever. Combined with random live monitoring and historical traffic analysis, I'm sure they can monitor more than enough to make it as unsafe to commit thought crime on the internet as it is for the average American to get away with hacking the average website hosted by a paranoid provider. I rather doubt they care about anyone posting on
Two Words:
Oxyacetylene Torch
One word:
Felony
Wow, at that speed, it would take you nearly a week to get through the gallon!
Longer, as it's approximately 4 days 14 hours from atlanta to juneau for 3,776 miles traveled at reasonable highway speeeds. Unless you drove for 7 days straight.
no, because while diamond is hard, in certain directions it is considerably more fracile and therefore not at all suited to making a glass replacement, as cost will always be prohbitive when compared to sticking some sand into a furnace for a few minutes for any standard application. The potential for either bit of research, though, is super-scratch resistant coastings (in the case of artificial diamonds) and high-strength and density glasses for specialized applications, such as in heavy industry or aerospace, and then only in instances where performance under stress is the defining factor, not cost. Barring a huge revolution in nanotech in the next 50 years, we're never going to see either in daily applications such as IPod screens and car windshields.